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There were few idle wheel-barrows in Elmridge on Saturday afternoon. If you had passed along the dusty Brickland Road between four and five o'clock, you would have encountered a droll procession. One passer-by stopped to enquire if there was going to be a Battle of Flowers.
Then at night were fireworks, the King made a speech, and to Manuel was delivered in wheel-barrows the sum of ten thousand sequins. Thereafter Manuel abode for a month at the court of King Helmas, noting whatever to this side and to that side seemed most notable.
But they refused to leave their men, who would not abandon the wheel-barrows. When I walked away the five were again beginning their slow hazardous pilgrimage to the next village. 11 P.M.: That night I lay rolled up in a blanket at the foot of a tree. The H.Q. waggon line was duly settled for the night when I arrived horses "hayed-up" and most of the men asleep on the ground.
Once there, and released from the rope, the natives seemed to know what they were supposed to do, and sullenly started doing it. "You usually use three pickmen, four shovellers, four for your timbering crew, three sorters, and six on the wheel-barrows," Philander explained.
They were so supremely happy running up and down the plank roads laid by the builders for their wheel-barrows, seesawing or balancing and sliding on others, that we could not face the desolation of emptiness which would come when the workmen removed their things.
Stahl made some wheel-barrows for the men to use instead of little baskets in which they carried earth, and which held nothing. But it was no use; they laughed at the wheel-barrows, and said "Eh yaw!" but went on with the baskets.
The high, half-finished embankment, the mounds of sand, clay, and rubble, the holes, the wheel-barrows standing here and there, the flat tops of the mud huts in which the workmen lived all this muddle, coloured to one tint by the darkness, gave the earth a strange, wild aspect that suggested the times of chaos.
'The tubs and baskets piled up with enormous clusters, the men and women carrying them away on their heads to the place where they were being crushed; the laughter, the merriment, the feasting, the firing for they make as much noise as they can all was delightful, to say nothing of the masquerading and dancing in the evening, which we saw, though we did not take part in it. In the winter the strangers were introduced to the Christmas Tree, which had not yet become a British institution: while with the first snow came the joys of sleighing, when wheel-barrows, tubs, baskets, everything that could be put on runners, were turned into sledges, and the boys were in their glory.
Cart-horses with harness on, and a lot of tired-looking saddle-hacks, covered with dry sweat, were fastened to cart-wheels, and to every available post and place. Heaps of old iron, broken-down drays and buggies and wheel-barrows, pumps and pieces of machinery, which Dad reckoned were worth a lot of money, were scattered about. Dad yearned to gather them all up and cart them home.
Scythes, reap-hooks, sheep-shears, bill-hooks, spades, mattocks, and hoes at the iron-monger's; bee-hives, butter-firkins, churns, milking stools and pails, hay-rakes, field-flagons, and seed-lips at the cooper's; cart-ropes and plough-harness at the saddler's; carts, wheel-barrows, and mill-gear at the wheelwright's and machinist's, horse-embrocations at the chemist's; at the glover's and leather-cutter's, hedging-gloves, thatchers' knee-caps, ploughmen's leggings, villagers' pattens and clogs.
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